“Anybody make anything of it?”
said Loder, turning from one to another.

I gathered from Smith’s face that he thought
one thing might be made of it—­namely, that
Loder had invented the whole tale. But even Smith
didn’t speak.

“Were any English ladies ever found to have
lived in the place—­murdered, you know—­bodies
found and all that?” young Marsham asked diffidently,
yearning for an obvious completeness.

“Not that we could ever learn,” Loder
replied. “We made inquiries too....
So you all give it up? Well, so do I....”

And he rose. As he walked to the door, myself
following him to get his hat and stick, I heard him
humming softly the lines—­they are from
Oft in the Stilly Night—­

“I seem like one who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose guests are fled, whose garlands dead,
And all but he—­departed!”

THE ROCKER

I

There was little need for the swart gipsies to explain,
as they stood knee-deep in the snow round the bailiff
of the Abbey Farm, what it was that had sent them.
The unbroken whiteness of the uplands told that, and,
even as they spoke, there came up the hill the dark
figures of the farm men with shovels, on their way
to dig out the sheep. In the summer, the bailiff
would have been the first to call the gipsies vagabonds
and roost-robbers; now ... they had women with them
too.

“The hares and foxes were down four days ago,
and the liquid-manure pumps like a snow man,”
the bailiff said.... “Yes, you can lie in
the laithes and welcome—­if you can find
’em. Maybe you’ll help us find our
sheep too—­”

The gipsies had done so. Coming back again, they
had had some ado to discover the spot where their
three caravans made a hummock of white against a broken
wall.

The women—­they had four women with them—­began
that afternoon to weave the mats and baskets they
hawked from door to door; and in the forenoon of the
following day one of them, the black-haired, soft-voiced
quean whom the bailiff had heard called Annabel, set
her babe in the sling on her back, tucked a bundle
of long cane-loops under her oxter, and trudged down
between eight-foot walls of snow to the Abbey Farm.
She stood in the latticed porch, dark and handsome
against the whiteness, and then, advancing, put her
head into the great hall-kitchen.

“Has the lady any chairs for the gipsy woman
to mend?” she asked in a soft and insinuating
voice....

They brought her the old chairs; she seated herself
on a box in the porch; and there she wove the strips
of cane in and out, securing each one with a little
wooden peg and a tap of her hammer. The child
remained in the sling at her back, taking the breast
from time to time over her shoulder; and the silver
wedding ring could be seen as she whipped the cane,
back and forth.